The possession obsession

Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” Luke 12:15

“Image is everything!” says Andre Aggasi as he touts the features of a camera.

And what is image? It’s the key to success, the door to opportunity, and the pizzazz that gives you acceptance with your peers. So what do we do? We buy, we buy, and buy more. “We receive 2,000 marketing messages every day,” says Jane Hammerslough in a recently released book, Dematerializing: Taming the Power of Possessions. The result is we have more and enjoy it less and at a cost of tremendous indebtedness.

Human nature never really changes. Consider these words: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). Jesus spoke those words to the people who came to hear him teach two thousand years ago. Jesus used two key words in his passage. The first word is translated “to watch,” which means to keep your eyes open. The second word translated “be on your guard” is a military word. Two thoughts are behind the word. First is the idea of guarding what you already have lest someone take it from you, and the second is the realization that an enemy is outside your gate and you need to protect yourself.

The enemy is materialism. It’s time to wake up and realize that what counts in life cannot be bought or acquired. We need to learn that more is not always better and that greed is a contagious virus that destroys what really counts. Kenneth Taylor paraphrased the words of Jesus, saying, “Beware! Don’t always be wishing for what you don’t have.”